[OliverJones]

In many countries, vendors from Apple to the guy selling apples on the street-corner collect Value-Added Tax (VAT) from their customers. It's a kind of sales tax that applies to all sales, not just retail sales to end users. It's harder for companies to play the international shell game with sales than it is with cash.

VAT seems to be sufficiently fair, workable, and enforceable. People don't like it, but nobody likes taxes.

The US feds can't do VAT though. It took the 16th amendment to allow the feds to collect income tax from people; it carves out an exception to the Article 1 requirement that all taxes be apportioned among the states by population.

This corporate alternative minimum tax idea seems to be a way to stay within the bounds of the 16th amendment and still collect business taxes.

None of it matters at all unless the tax-audit authorities get more teeth than they now have. Business-tax compliance in the US could easily go down Greece's path, where you're a chump unless you cheat.